I’ve started selling my t-shirt designs online at MySoti.com.  There are two designs available right now, and I’ll be adding at least one fresh design a week.  Check them all out here.

For the past three months we’ve been living in an apartment complex in South Bixby, a first for me.  I’ve always lived in the sprawl of suburbia, but somehow managed to go three decades without inhabiting a residential cubicle.  In a couple more weeks we’ll take ownership of our first house, another landmark on the road away from youth.  Though I never thought I would, I’ll miss this place.

Sure, the apartment itself is roughly the size of the handicap stall in the bathroom at the airport Ramada, replete with its own bathroom that makes a port-a-potty seem like the presidential suite at the Luxor.  Did you follow that?  Summary: small apartment, even smaller bathroom.  But it’s not the apartment I’ll miss, though there is something spiritual about forced simplicity.

What I’ll truly miss is the atmosphere.  On a night like tonight, my wife out of town, I step out the door into the cool night, the air sweet with a melange of grilled meat, second-hand marijuana, and honeysuckle, carried on the backs of fireflies blearing in the serenade of rolling, unhurried conversation that swells to laughter before receding into murmurs.  The night does something special to the complex; the light of day exposes the cracks, the separations, the breaks, ushering in its own agenda and ambition, but the night wraps us all in its wings, shadowing the outside pull that drives our isolation.  At night the complex lives, it inhales the exhaustion of an over-wrought people, whispers softly that, for a moment, we might be a nation, a group all our own, that we might experience the joy of not being sold anything, of not owing anything to anyone outside of the faces before us.  At night, the complex is a pulsing, vibrating organism, where children playing in the slice of light cut into the darkness by the lightpoles and doorside lamps, blur into a bokeh of shape and color and contrast.

Sometimes I think I was created for communal living.  Neighborhoods become containers, shelves for little boxes of people.  Being with other humans, with friends, sharing words, food, passions, anger, fears, insecurities, sharing life is something from which I never tire.  I crave it.  While the isolationist momentum of suburban living has instilled a voice of separation, nagging on that people shouldn’t need each other, shouldn’t need engagement outside of their home and family, every cell in my body cries out for community.  That’s why, on nights like tonight, I think about moving into our new house, three times the size of this tiny apartment, and I let myself feel a little joy, and a little sadness.